Posts Tagged ‘tours’

We had another nice CALL trip Saturday. ( CALL stands for Columbus Academy of Lifelong Learning.) A bus load of us went from the parking lot at the Columbus State University Elizabeth Bradley-Turner Center for Continuing Education to Montgomery, Alabama to soak up museum and theater culture.

First, we went to the Montgomery Museum of Art. It is a beautiful facility with lots of interesting classical and contemporary art, plus impressive displays of glass sculpture. As I commented to some fellow travelers – I couldn’t have called them that in the 1950s because Sen. Joe McCarthy would have investigated us – the Montgomery and Columbus art museum buildings are more artistic and beautiful than the big High Museum in Atlanta. I realize that such judgements are subjective – but then isn’t all of art?

After that, we had lunch at Montgomery’s Olive Garden. It took so long for our big crowd to get served, I was afraid we would miss the play at the Shakespeare Festival, but, alas, we didn’t. The food was worth the wait. I had Venetian Apricot Chicken. It’s grilled chicken, asparagus, and brocoli, covered with an apricot sauce. It’s was maybe a little too sweet for me, but as I got use to the abundance of sugar, it started tasting good. I don’t know why restaurants think they have to over-sugar and over-salt everything. As everyone knows, it’s easy to add salt and sugar, but impossible to take it out of food.

The weird play at the Shakespeare Festival was not by Shakespeare. They mix them up. They are doing some Shakespeare later in the season. The play we saw was a spoof of the famous Alfred Hitchcock 1935 movie cloak-and-dagger thriller The 39 Steps. Four actors – really good ones – played all of the parts a la Springer Tuna style, but with four people instead of just two. Once one gets into the hang of the thing, it’s fun. It is broad, slapstick farce, sort of like the early TV Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca skits, only this skit was a full-length play, or maybe another way of putting it is that it was the Four Stooges with British accents. The actors got a lot of laughs and a thundering standing ovation when it was over.

All in all, it was another enjoyable CALL excursion. If you are retired and want to enjoy lifelong learning with a bunch of freindly fun-loving folks, when the CALL classes crank back up in the Fall, come join us. There is a fee, but it’s reasonable.

You really don’t have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to find interesting places to visit, which, in these economic times, is a good thing. For instance if you live within a 50 mile radius of LaGrange, Georgia, you will probably enjoy spending a couple of days there. I did, last week.

LaGrange holds sort of a special interest for me because, not only do I have some friends there, I lived there myself almost 60 years ago. And, yes it has truly changed in that length of time. I went to work at WLAG in LaGrange in December of 1949. I’ll get into that on a future post.

In 1950, LaGrange was most definitely a mill town, the Callaway Mills’ town. The power of the Callaways in LaGrange was legendary. “You don’t open a business in LaGrange unless Fuller Callaway, Jr. says you can,” someone told me. I don’t know how true that was, but after I saw Hills and Dales, the Italian Villa style mansion last week, it was easy for me to grasp that the Callaways were royalty in LaGrange.

Hills and Dales Italianate Villa, Front Entrance, LaGrange, Georgia

The incredible opulence and beauty of this place is close to breathtaking. It was built in 1916 for Fuller Callaway, Sr, the founder of the Callaway fortune. Fuller’s wife Alice devoted a lot of her time to the estate’s sumptuous formal gardens. It looks like something you would see in a European palace, or that great American Palace, the Vanderbilt Home in North Carolina.

When Fuller Callaway, Jr. died in 1992, the family followed his wishes and gave the property to the Fuller Callaway Foundation and opened it to the public, which is what the Vanderbilt family did when George Vanderbilt II died in 1914.

Picture taking is not allowed inside the Callaway villa, “but you can take all you want on the outside,” our guide told us. That’s the reason you don’t see any indoor shots. It was about what I would expect it to be on the inside, large rooms with high ceilings, expensively ornate and pretentious.

Titanic Grand Staircase, 1911

The living room with its grand staircase made me think of the grand staircase on the Titantic.

Hills and Dales formal gardens, LaGrange, Georgia

And everywhere you turn in the formal garden you can take an interesting picture. One of the most intresting topiaries is the one that spells the word God, which was first planted and developed by Sarah Ferrell who started the gardens long before Fuller Callaway purchased the property.

Hills and Dales formal gardens, LaGrange, Georgia

As I toured this estate I had to reflect on the wealth it represented and the way the money was earned, for the most part, with the help of many hundreds of mill workers who ran and maintained the looms and lived in mill villages. Some of those workers tried to unionize in the mid 1930’s, but were unsuccessful. The Callaways took a patriarchal approach, supplying many services for the workers and their families, including a big gymnasium and swimming pool. They also gave a lot of money to public institutions in LaGrange, including Lagrange College. And the Callaway Foundation continues to pour money into civic projects and public institutions in LaGrange to this day.

Coming up on this blog, how LaGrange has improved its downtown area, including a restaurant that serves the best cooked fresh vegetables I have ever tasted.